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YouTube subtitles as plain text, without timestamps

Written by the VidWords Team · August 20, 2026 · Updated October 8, 2026 · Report a correction

To get a YouTube video's subtitles as plain, readable text, paste the link into VidWords, choose Text only next to the Copy button, and press Copy. Or pick .txt, text only in the download menu to save the same thing as a file. You get the captions joined into paragraphs, with no timecodes, cue numbers or broken lines, ready to paste into Word, Google Docs, ChatGPT or an email. The first 3 videos a month need no account.

This opens the transcript on VidWords. A direct link works too: https://vidwords.com/?v=VIDEO_ID.

Copy a transcript out of YouTube's own viewer and every line comes with a timecode like 0:15, 0:18, 0:22. Pasted into a document or an AI chat, that's a wall of numbers and phrases broken off mid-sentence. Here's how to get the words alone.

Method 1: Text only on VidWords (fastest)

1. Copy the YouTube video link. In the app, tap Share → Copy link.
2. Paste it into the box above, or into VidWords, and press Get transcript free.
3. In the transcript toolbar, set the menu next to Copy to Text only.
4. Press Copy. To save a file instead, choose .txt, text only in the download menu and press Download.

Here is what you get. The words are an illustration, not a real video:

## Getting started

So today we're going to look at how the setup works, and why the
first step matters more than most people expect.

We'll start with the basics and then move on to the parts that
usually go wrong.

The captions are merged into paragraphs that break at the video's chapters, and chapter titles appear as ## Heading lines (delete them if you don't want them). Every spoken word in the caption track is kept, and only the times are dropped. Two other options are easy to confuse with this one:

• Copy → Timestamps puts one time in front of each paragraph.
• The plain .txt download is one caption per line, each with its time, like [00:01:23] …. That's useful as a record, but it isn't the plain-text version.

Limits: the first 3 videos a month need no account, a free account includes 25 Cloud Requests a month, and the Chrome extension on a computer is unlimited. The video needs a caption track. Music-only clips and uploads only minutes old may not have one, and then you get a clear message instead of an empty file.

Method 2: The YouTube viewer "Toggle timestamps" trick

YouTube does have a built-in toggle to hide timestamps, though it is hidden in a menu:

1. Open the video on YouTube in a desktop browser.
2. Click ... More in the description box and choose Show transcript.
3. In the transcript drawer on the right, click the three vertical dots (⋮) at the top right corner.
4. Click Toggle timestamps. The timecodes will disappear.
5. Select the text and copy it (Ctrl+A / Cmd+A or drag-select).

Limitation: While this removes the numbers, YouTube still puts every 3 to 6 words on a new line. When pasted into a document, you will still have awkward line breaks on every phrase that you must manually delete.

Method 3: Removing timestamps with Regex in a text editor

If you already have a raw transcript full of timestamps and want to clean it up in VS Code, Sublime Text, or Notepad++:

1. Open the Find & Replace panel (Ctrl+H or Cmd+Alt+F).
2. Enable Regular Expressions (the .* icon).
3. In the Find field, enter: ^\d+:\d+(?::\d+)?\s* (or \n\d+:\d+\n if timestamps sit on their own lines). For a VidWords .txt export, where each line starts with [00:01:23], use ^\[\d+:\d+(?::\d+)?\]\s*.
4. Leave the Replace field empty and click Replace All.

Why removing timestamps helps with AI tools

When you paste a transcript into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, every timecode costs tokens and carries no meaning. A caption line is only a handful of words, so on a timestamp-per-line transcript the numbers are a noticeable share of what you paste. They also chop sentences into fragments, which makes the text harder to follow for a model as well as a person.

Clean paragraphs keep each argument in one piece. Keep timestamps only when you want the answer to point back to moments in the video, and then one per paragraph (Copy → Timestamps) is usually enough.

FAQ

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